Piracy in Somalia: Violence and Development in the Horn of Africa

Piracy in Somalia sheds light on an often misunderstood world that is oversimplified and demonized in the media and largely decontextualized in scholarly and policy works. It examines the root causes of piracy in Somalia as well as piracy’s impact on coastal communities, local views about it, and measures taken against it. Drawing on six years’ worth of extensive fieldwork, it amplifies the voices of local communities who have suffered under the heavy weight of illegal fishing, piracy, and counter-piracy; it makes their struggles comprehensible. It also exposes complex webs of crimes within crimes, of double-dealing pirates, fraudulent negotiators, duplicitous intermediaries, and treacherous foreign illegal fishers and their local partners. Piracy in Somalia will help inform regional and global counter-piracy endeavors, to avoid possible reversals in the gains made so far against piracy, and to identify the gains that still need to be made against its root causes.